Rethinking "Hobbits": What They Mean for Human Evolution

In 2004 a team of Australian and Indonesian scientists who had been excavating a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores announced that they had unearthed something extraordinary: a partial skeleton of an adult human female who would have stood just over a meter tall and who had a brain a third as large as our own. The specimen, known to scientists as LB1, quickly received a fanciful nickname—the hobbit, after writer J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional creatures. The team proposed that LB1 and the other fragmentary remains they recovered represent a previously unknown human species, Homo floresiensis. Their best guess was that H. floresiensis was a descendant of H. erectus—the first species known to have colonized outside of Africa. The creature evolved its small size, they surmised, as a response to the limited resources available on its island home—a phenomenon that had previously been documented in other mammals, but never humans.

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